Uralo-Siberian is a hypothetical

language family A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'', called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in hi ...

consisting of Uralic,

Yukaghir The Yukaghirs, or Yukagirs ( (), russian: юкаги́ры) are a Siberian ethnic group people in the Russian Far East, living in the basin of the Kolyma River. Geographic distribution The Tundra Yukaghirs live in the Lower Kolyma region ...

, Eskaleut, possibly Nivkh, and formerly Chukotko-Kamchatkan. It was proposed in 1998 by

Michael Fortescue Michael David Fortescue (born 8 August 1946) is a British-born linguist specializing in Arctic and native North American languages, including Kalaallisut, Inuktun, Chukchi and Nitinaht. He gained his PhD in Linguistics from the University of E ...

, an expert in Eskaleut and Chukotko-Kamchatkan, in his book ''Language Relations across Bering Strait''. In 2011, Fortescue removed Chukotko-Kamchatkan from the proposal.

History

Structural similarities between Uralic and Eskaleut languages were observed early. In 1746, the Danish theologian compared Greenlandic to Hungarian. In 1818,

Rasmus Rask Rasmus Kristian Rask (; born Rasmus Christian Nielsen Rasch; 22 November 1787 – 14 November 1832) was a Danish linguist and philologist. He wrote several grammars and worked on comparative phonology and morphology. Rask traveled extensively to ...

considered Greenlandic to be related to the Uralic languages, Finnish in particular, and presented a list of lexical correspondences (Rask also considered Uralic and

Altaic Altaic (; also called Transeurasian) is a controversial proposed language family that would include the Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic language families and possibly also the Japonic and Koreanic languages. Speakers of these languages are ...

to be related to each other). In 1959,

Knut Bergsland Knut Bergsland (7 March 1914 – 9 July 1998) was a Norwegian linguist. Working as a professor at the University of Oslo from 1947 to 1981, he did groundbreaking research in Uralic (especially Sami) and Eskaleut languages. Career He was born in ...

published the paper ''The Eskimo–Uralic Hypothesis'', in which he, like other authors before him, presented a number of grammatical similarities and a small number of lexical correspondences. In 1962,

Morris Swadesh Morris Swadesh (; January 22, 1909 – July 20, 1967) was an American linguist who specialized in comparative and historical linguistics. Swadesh was born in Massachusetts to Bessarabian Jewish immigrant parents. He completed bachelor's and ma ...

proposed a relationship between the Eskaleut and Chukotko-Kamchatkan language families. In 1998, Michael Fortescue presented more detailed arguments in his book, ''Language Relations across Bering Strait''. His title evokes Morris Swadesh's 1962 article, "Linguistic relations across the Bering Strait".

(2017) presents, besides new linguistic evidence, also several genetic studies, that support a common origin of the included groups, with a suggested homeland in

Northeast Asia Northeast Asia or Northeastern Asia is a geographical subregion of Asia; its northeastern landmass and islands are bounded by the Pacific Ocean. The term Northeast Asia was popularized during the 1930s by American historian and political scienti ...

. In 2022, a group of scholars noted that "''the morphosyntactic typology of Uralic is distinctive in western Eurasia. A number of typological properties are eastern-looking overall, fitting comfortably into northeast Asia, Siberia, or the North Pacific Rim''".

Typology

Fortescue (1998, pp. 60–95) surveys 44 typological markers and argues that a typological profile uniquely identifying the language families proposed to comprise the Uralo-Siberian family can be established. The Uralo-Siberian hypothesis is rooted in the assumption that this distinct typological profile was, rather than an areal profile common to four unrelated language families, the profile of a ''single'' language ancestral to all four: Proto-Uralo-Siberian. ;Phonology * A single, voiceless series of

stop consonant In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or simply a stop, is a pulmonic consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be made with the tongue tip or blade (, ), tongue body (, ), lip ...

s. **

Voiced Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds (usually consonants). Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless (otherwise known as ''unvoiced'') or voiced. The term, however, is used to refe ...

stops such as occur in the

Indo-European The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutc ...

Yeniseian The Yeniseian languages (sometimes known as Yeniseic or Yenisei-Ostyak;" Ostyak" is a concept of areal rather than genetic linguistics. In addition to the Yeniseian languages it also includes the Uralic languages Khanty and Selkup. occasionall ...

, Turkic, Mongolian, Tungusic,

Japonic Japonic or Japanese–Ryukyuan, sometimes also Japanic, is a language family comprising Japanese, spoken in the main islands of Japan, and the Ryukyuan languages, spoken in the Ryukyu Islands. The family is universally accepted by linguists, and ...

and

Sino-Tibetan Sino-Tibetan, also cited as Trans-Himalayan in a few sources, is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. The vast majority of these are the 1.3 billion native speakers of Chinese languages. ...

languages. They have also later arisen in several branches of Uralic. ** Aspirated stops such as occur in

Korean Korean may refer to: People and culture * Koreans, ethnic group originating in the Korean Peninsula * Korean cuisine * Korean culture * Korean language **Korean alphabet, known as Hangul or Chosŏn'gŭl **Korean dialects and the Jeju language ** ...

, Nivkh,

Na-Dene Na-Dene (; also Nadene, Na-Dené, Athabaskan–Eyak–Tlingit, Tlina–Dene) is a family of Native American languages that includes at least the Athabaskan languages, Eyak, and Tlingit languages. Haida was formerly included, but is now considered ...

Haida Haida may refer to: Places * Haida, an old name for Nový Bor * Haida Gwaii, meaning "Islands of the People", formerly called the Queen Charlotte Islands * Haida Islands, a different archipelago near Bella Bella, British Columbia Ships * , a 1 ...

, etc. **

Ejective In phonetics, ejective consonants are usually voiceless consonants that are pronounced with a glottalic egressive airstream. In the phonology of a particular language, ejectives may contrast with aspirated, voiced and tenuis consonants. Some ...

stops such as occur in Na-Dene, Haida,

Salishan The Salishan (also Salish) languages are a family of languages of the Pacific Northwest in North America (the Canadian province of British Columbia and the American states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana). They are characterised by ...

Tsimshian The Tsimshian (; tsi, Ts’msyan or Tsm'syen) are an Indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest Coast. Their communities are mostly in coastal British Columbia in Terrace and Prince Rupert, and Metlakatla, Alaska on Annette Island, the only re ...

, etc. * A series of voiced non-sibilant fricatives, including //, which lack voiceless counterparts such as . ** Original non-sibilant fricatives are absent from most other languages of Eurasia. Voiceless fricatives prevail over voiced ones in most of northern America. Both voiced and voiceless fricatives occur in Nivkh. * Primary

palatal The palate () is the roof of the mouth in humans and other mammals. It separates the oral cavity from the nasal cavity. A similar structure is found in crocodilians, but in most other tetrapods, the oral and nasal cavities are not truly separ ...

or palatalized consonants such as , . * The occurrence of a

rhotic consonant In phonetics, rhotic consonants, or "R-like" sounds, are liquid consonants that are traditionally represented orthographically by symbols derived from the Greek letter rho, including , in the Latin script and , in the Cyrillic script. The ...

. ** Found in most other language families of northern Eurasia as well; however, widely absent from languages of northern America. *

Consonant cluster In linguistics, a consonant cluster, consonant sequence or consonant compound, is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. In English, for example, the groups and are consonant clusters in the word ''splits''. In the education fi ...

s are absent word-initially and word-finally, but present word-medially. ** A feature shared with most 'Altaic' languages. Contrasts with the presence of abundant consonant clusters in Nivkh, as well as in the Indo-European and Salishan languages. * Canonically bisyllabic word roots, with the exception of pronouns. ** Contrasts with canonically monosyllabic word roots in Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Yeniseian, Na-Dene, Haida, Tsimshian, Wakashan, Salishan, etc. Some secondarily monosyllabic word roots have developed in Aleut and multiple Uralic languages, and they predominate in Itelmen. * Word-initial stress. ;Morphology * Exclusively suffixal morphology. ** Contrasts particularly with Yeniseian and Na-Dene. *

Accusative case The accusative case ( abbreviated ) of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. In the English language, the only words that occur in the accusative case are pronouns: 'me,' 'him,' 'her,' 'us,' and ‘th ...

genitive case In grammar, the genitive case ( abbreviated ) is the grammatical case that marks a word, usually a noun, as modifying another word, also usually a noun—thus indicating an attributive relationship of one noun to the other noun. A genitive can a ...

and at least three local cases. *

singular Singular may refer to: * Singular, the grammatical number that denotes a unit quantity, as opposed to the plural and other forms * Singular homology * SINGULAR, an open source Computer Algebra System (CAS) * Singular or sounder, a group of boar, ...

plural The plural (sometimes abbreviated pl., pl, or ), in many languages, is one of the values of the grammatical category of number. The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than the default quantity represented by that noun. This d ...

and

dual Dual or Duals may refer to: Paired/two things * Dual (mathematics), a notion of paired concepts that mirror one another ** Dual (category theory), a formalization of mathematical duality *** see more cases in :Duality theories * Dual (grammatical ...

number. * The absence of

adjective In linguistics, an adjective ( abbreviated ) is a word that generally modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Traditionally, adjectives were considered one of the ma ...

s and

adverb An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, adjective, another adverb, determiner, clause, preposition, or sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, level of certainty, etc., answering que ...

s as morphologically distinct

parts of speech In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech (abbreviated as POS or PoS, also known as word class or grammatical category) is a category of words (or, more generally, of lexical items) that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are ass ...

. *

Evidentiality In linguistics, evidentiality is, broadly, the indication of the nature of evidence for a given statement; that is, whether evidence exists for the statement and if so, what kind. An evidential (also verificational or validational) is the particul ...

marking. *

Indicative A realis mood ( abbreviated ) is a grammatical mood which is used principally to indicate that something is a statement of fact; in other words, to express what the speaker considers to be a known state of affairs, as in declarative sentences. Mos ...

markers based on

participle In linguistics, a participle () (from Latin ' a "sharing, partaking") is a nonfinite verb form that has some of the characteristics and functions of both verbs and adjectives. More narrowly, ''participle'' has been defined as "a word derived from ...

s. *

Possessive suffix In linguistics, a possessive affix (from la, affixum possessivum) is an affix (usually suffix or prefix) attached to a noun to indicate its possessor, much in the manner of possessive adjectives. Possessive affixes are found in many languages o ...

es. ; Syntax * The presence of a copula, used as an auxiliary verb. *

Negation In logic, negation, also called the logical complement, is an operation that takes a proposition P to another proposition "not P", written \neg P, \mathord P or \overline. It is interpreted intuitively as being true when P is false, and fals ...

expressed by an auxiliary verb (known as a

negative verb Dryer defined three different types of negative markers in language. Beside negative particles and negative affixes, negative verbs play a role in various languages. The negative verb is used to implement a clausal negation. The negative predica ...

) *

Subordinate clause A subordinate clause, dependent clause, subclause, or embedded clause is a clause that is embedded within a complex sentence. For instance, in the English sentence "I know that Bette is a dolphin", the clause "that Bette is a dolphin" occurs as t ...

s based on

non-finite verb A nonfinite verb is a derivative form of a verb unlike finite verbs. Accordingly, nonfinite verb forms are inflected for neither number nor person, and they cannot perform action as the root of an independent clause. In English, nonfinite verbs inc ...

forms. None of the four families shows all of these 17 features; ranging from 12 reconstructible in Proto-Chukotko-Kamchatkan to 16 in

Proto-Uralic Proto-Uralic is the unattested reconstructed language ancestral to the modern Uralic language family. The hypothetical language is believed to have been originally spoken in a small area in about 7000–2000 BCE, and expanded to give differenti ...

. Frequently the modern-day descendant languages have diverged further from this profile — particularly

Itelmen The Itelmens ( Itelmen: Итәнмән, russian: Ительмены) are an indigenous ethnic group of the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia. The Itelmen language is distantly related to Chukchi and Koryak, forming the Chukotko-Kamchatkan langu ...

, for which Fortescue assumes substrate influence from a language typologically more alike to the non-Uralo-Siberian languages of the region. Several more widely spread typologically significant features may also instead represent contact influence, according to Fortescue (1998): * Primary

uvular consonant Uvulars are consonants articulated with the back of the tongue against or near the uvula, that is, further back in the mouth than velar consonants. Uvulars may be stops, fricatives, nasals, trills, or approximants, though the IPA does not pro ...

s are absent from Uralic, but can be found in Chukotko-Kamchatkan and Eskaleut. They are also present in Yukaghir, though are likely to be of secondary origin there (as also in the Uralic Selkup, as well as a large number of Turkic languages). They are, however, firmly entrenched in the non-Uralo-Siberian languages of northernmost Eurasia, including Yeniseian, Nivkh, Na-Dene, Haida, Salishan, etc. Fortescue suggests that the presence of uvulars in CK and EA may, then, represent an ancient areal innovation acquired from the earlier, "pre-Na-Dene" languages of Beringia.

Evidence

Morphology

Apparently shared elements of Uralo-Siberian morphology include the following: Proponents of the

Nostratic Nostratic is a controversial hypothetical macrofamily, which includes many of the indigenous language families of Eurasia, although its exact composition and structure vary among proponents. It typically comprises Kartvelian, Indo-European and ...

hypothesis consider these apparent correspondences to be evidence in support of the proposed larger Nostratic family.

Lexicon

Fortescue (1998) lists 94 lexical correspondence sets with reflexes in at least three of the four language families, and even more shared by two of the language families. Examples are *ap(p)a 'grandfather', *kað'a 'mountain' and many others. Below are some lexical items reconstructed to Proto-Uralo-Siberian, along with their reflexes in

, Proto-Chukotko-Kamchatkan (sometimes Proto-Chukchi), and Proto-Eskaleut (sometimes

Proto-Eskimo Proto-Eskimoan or Proto-Eskimo is the reconstructed ancestor of the Eskimoan languages. It was spoken by the ancestors of the Yupik and Inuit peoples. It is linguistically related to the Aleut language, and both descend from the Proto-Eskimo–A ...

Aleut The Aleuts ( ; russian: Алеуты, Aleuty) are the indigenous people of the Aleutian Islands, which are located between the North Pacific Ocean and the Bering Sea. Both the Aleut people and the islands are politically divided between the U ...

). (Source: Fortescue 1998:152–158.)

Regular sound correspondences

These sound correspondences with Yukaghir were suggested in Fortescue (1998): Yukaghir and Uralic: ;Examples of proposed regular sound correspondences Uralic *t- : Eskimo *t- (before a Uralic back vowel) *Proto-Uralic *tolɨ- ‘come’ *Proto-Eskimo *tulaɣ- ‘to land' *Proto-Finno-Ugric *toxi- ‘bring’ *Proto-Eskimo *təkit- ‘arrive' *Proto-Uralic *tumti- ‘know’ *Proto-Eskimo *tucaʀ- ‘understand’ *Proto-Finno-Ugric *tålå ‘shelter’ *Proto-Eskimo *talu(-) ‘screen or partition’ ''Uralic *t- : Eskimo *c- (before a Uralic front vowel) *Proto-Finno-Ugric *täwi ‘full’ *Proto-Eskimo *ciləɣ- ‘be full’ *Proto-Finno-Ugric *teki- ‘do’ *Proto-Eskimo *caɣiqə- ‘make an effort’ Uralic *ń- : Eskimo *Ø- *Proto-Uralic *ńåxlɨ- ‘lick’ *Proto-Eskimo *aluɣ- ‘lick’ Uralic *Ø- : Eskimo *n- *Proto-Finno-Ugric *äktä ‘cut’ *Proto-Eskimo *naɣci(t)- ‘catch on bottom’ *Proto-Finno-Ugric *uwå ‘stream’ *Proto-Eskimo *nuvaɣ ‘saliva’

Vocabulary

Vocabulary: The meanings 'weave' and 'morning' are most likely unrelated, which means that these are instances of coincidental homonymy, which only very rarely happens by chance, which means that some kind of contact most likely happened, but exact conclusions cannot be drawn with modern information.

Proto-Uralic and Proto-Eskaleut number and case markers

Proto-Uralic and Proto-Eskaleut number and case markers:

Yukaghir and Proto-Eskaleut verbal and nominal inflections

Yukaghir and Proto-Eskaleut verbal and nominal inflections:

Possessive suffixes

Possessive suffixes: Nenets accusative and Eskimo relative possessive affixes

Nivkh

Fortescue did not consider Nivkh a part of Uralo-Siberian. However,

Frederik Kortlandt Frederik Herman Henri (Frits) Kortlandt (born 19 June 1946) is a Dutch former professor of descriptive and comparative linguistics at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He writes on Baltic and Slavic languages, the Indo-European languages in ge ...

considers Nivkh part of Uralo-Siberian, as well as Indo-Uralic: some evidences for the relationship are: Uralic participle *-pa and Nivkh Gerund: *-pa. The pronouns *mi, *ti compared to Nivkh: n´i and či.

Chukotko-Kamchatkan

Fortescue at first included Chukotko-Kamchatkan in the family, but later concluded that the similarities are due to mutual influence. Fortescue also said that Chukotko-Kamchatkan has more similarities with Nivkh.

Similarities

Proto-language

Proto-Uralo-Siberian lexical reconstructions by Michael Fortescue (2011) are: :

Urheimat

Fortescue argues that the Uralo-Siberian proto-language (or a complex of related proto-languages) may have been spoken by

Mesolithic The Mesolithic (Greek: μέσος, ''mesos'' 'middle' + λίθος, ''lithos'' 'stone') or Middle Stone Age is the Old World archaeological period between the Upper Paleolithic and the Neolithic. The term Epipaleolithic is often used synonymousl ...

hunting and fishing people in south-central

Siberia Siberia ( ; rus, Сибирь, r=Sibir', p=sʲɪˈbʲirʲ, a=Ru-Сибирь.ogg) is an extensive geographical region, constituting all of North Asia, from the Ural Mountains in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east. It has been a part of ...

(roughly, from the upper

Yenisei The Yenisey (russian: Енисе́й, ''Yeniséy''; mn, Горлог мөрөн, ''Gorlog mörön''; Buryat: Горлог мүрэн, ''Gorlog müren''; Tuvan: Улуг-Хем, ''Uluğ-Hem''; Khakas: Ким суғ, ''Kim suğ''; Ket: Ӄук ...

river to

Lake Baikal Lake Baikal (, russian: Oзеро Байкал, Ozero Baykal ); mn, Байгал нуур, Baigal nuur) is a rift lake in Russia. It is situated in southern Siberia, between the federal subjects of Irkutsk Oblast to the northwest and the Rep ...

) between 8000 and 6000 BC, and that the proto-languages of the derived families may have been carried northward out of this homeland in several successive waves down to about 4000 BC, leaving the Samoyedic branch of Uralic in occupation of the

Urheimat In historical linguistics, the homeland or ''Urheimat'' (, from German '' ur-'' "original" and ''Heimat'', home) of a proto-language is the region in which it was spoken before splitting into different daughter languages. A proto-language is the ...

thereafter.

Relationships

Some or all of the four Uralo-Siberian families have been included in more extensive groupings of languages (see links below). Fortescue's hypothesis does not oppose or exclude these various proposals. In particular, he considers that a remote relationship between Uralo-Siberian and Altaic (or some part of Altaic) is likely (see Ural–Altaic languages). However, Fortescue holds that Uralo-Siberian lies within the bounds of the provable, whereas Nostratic may be too remote a grouping to ever be convincingly demonstrated. The

University of Leiden Leiden University (abbreviated as ''LEI''; nl, Universiteit Leiden) is a public research university in Leiden, Netherlands. The university was founded as a Protestant university in 1575 by William, Prince of Orange, as a reward to the city of L ...

linguist

(2006:1) asserts that Indo-Uralic (a proposed language family consisting of Uralic and Indo-European) is itself a branch of Uralo-Siberian and that, furthermore, the

Nivkh language Nivkh (; occasionally also Nivkhic; self-designation: Нивхгу диф, ''Nivxgu dif'', ), or Gilyak (), or Amuric, is a small language family, often portrayed as a language isolate, of two or three mutually unintelligible languages spoken b ...

also belongs to Uralo-Siberian. This would make Uralo-Siberian the proto-language of a much vaster language family. Kortlandt (2006:3) considers that Uralo-Siberian and

(defined by him as consisting of Turkic, Mongolian, Tungusic, Korean, and Japanese) may be coordinate branches of the

Eurasiatic Eurasiatic is a proposed language macrofamily that would include many language families historically spoken in northern, western, and southern Eurasia. The idea of a Eurasiatic superfamily dates back more than 100 years. Joseph Greenberg's prop ...

language family proposed by

Joseph Greenberg Joseph Harold Greenberg (May 28, 1915 – May 7, 2001) was an American linguist, known mainly for his work concerning linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages. Life Early life and education Joseph Greenberg was born on M ...

but rejected by most linguists.

Bibliography

Works cited

* * Fortescue, Michael. 1998. ''Language Relations across Bering Strait: Reappraising the Archaeological and Linguistic Evidence.'' London and New York: Cassell. . * Kortlandt, Frederik. 2006
"Indo-Uralic and Altaic"
*

References

External links

Linguist List post about Uralo-Eskimo grammar
as reconstructed by Uwe Seefloth, who finds Uralic and Eskaleut to be each other's closest relatives within Uralo-Siberian *
Discussion of the above
and comparisons to

*
More discussion of the above

"Nivkh as a Uralo-Siberian language"
by Frederik Kortlandt (2004)
"Chukcho-Kamchatkan and Uralic: Evidence of their genetic relationship"
by Václav Blažek (2006) {{Eurasian languages Proposed language families History of Northeast Asia Uralic languages Paleosiberian languages Eskaleut languages